Ethnography in China Today

This book includes twenty chapters reviewing a total of sixty-four books in Chinese in the two series:
“Studies in Chinese Ritual, Theatre and Folklore” and “Traditional Hakka Society,” edited respectively by Wang Ch’iu-kuei and John Lagerwey. It is intended to inform the wider world of scholarship of this new research, which provides the most detailed information ever available about Chinese local culture, drama and religion. Together with the excellent studies of this dimension of culture by scholars in Taiwan, and with a revived interest in this area by other China mainland scholars, it represents a resumption of the folklore studies movement of the 1920s and 1930s that was interrupted by the war with Japan. These new reports may also be seen as a complement to the work of anthropologists, who until recently have not been able to conduct many field studies in China. As such, this research provides fresh information for an understanding of the culture of the majority of the Chinese people, an understanding based on their lived experiences and values.

DANIEL L. OVERMYER is professor emeritus in the Department of Asian Studies and the Centre for Chinese Research at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. His major research interests are Chinese popular religion, and scriptures produced by popular religious sects in the Ming and Qing periods (15th - 19th centuries). His most recent books are Precious Volumes: An Introduction to Chinese Sectarian Scriptures from the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Harvard-Yenching Institute Monograph, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), Religions of China: The World As a Living System (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), and The Flying Phoenix: Aspects of Chinese Sectarianism in Taiwan, co-authored with David K. Jordan (Taipei: Caves Books, Ltd., 1986), etc.